On Wednesday 19^th June 2024, Warwick Medical School hosted the annual Postgraduate Research Symposium. The PGR symposium is a monitoring point for all of the Medical School PGR students and provides our second- and third-year PGR students with an opportunity to present their research to the academic audience across the Medical School and beyond, and receive valuable feedback. Students in theirt second year will deliver poster presentations, and those in their third year will give oral presentations.

At this years symposium, all three TRANSFORM PhD students travelled to the UK to participate. Third year students Adeola Afolayan and Tolulope Bella-Awusah travelled from Nigeria and joined second year student Nadia Alam from Bangladesh.

During the day, poster presentations from 2nd year students were on display and staff were encouraged to review the posters and vote for their favourite. Nadia Alam, presented her poster: "Digital Phenotyping and Serious Mental Disorders, Predicting Symptom Re-emergence and Relapse among Slum Residents in Dhaka, Bangladesh: A Machine Learning Study". Nadia's poster received a lot of interest and Nadia commented that people had a lot of interest around the complexities in predicting mental health relapses from our smartphones. People were also intrigued about the feasibility of digital phenotyping in slums.

During the afternoon both Adeola and Tolu delivered their oral presentations.

Adeola delivered her presentation “Wellbeing, Experiences and Needs of Children of Persons with Serious Mental Illness (CoPSMI) in Slum Communities in Ibadan Nigeria" and responded to a range of interesting audience questions.

When asked how she prepared for her presentation, Adeola said that “First, I had to think through what the main crux of the presentation should be since I had a lot of useful data. Next, I had to put together my slides in a way that could engage my audience. Then, I did a lot of rehearsals, including rehearsing with my supervisors.” Adeola went on to comment that her supervisors “provided me with academic and psychological support. For instance, I was able to rehearse my presentation and get helpful feedback that really helped me on the day of the presentation. I also got words of encouragement from them.”

Tolu’s presentation “Mental Wellbeing, Resilience and Help Seeking among socially disadvantaged adolescents living in selected slum areas of Ibadan, Nigeria” was well received by the audience, and prompted an engaging question and answers session.

Following the symposium, Tolu reflected on her feedback, nothing that she had received “very encouraging feedback, particularly about the photographs taken by my participants during one of the methodologies used (PhotoVoice). The photographs helped the audience to really connect with and understand the day to day struggles of the participants in my study.” This feedback has been valuable for Tolu who shared that “the feedback has motivated me to work towards sharing more aspects of my study, through a manuscript, and more conference presentations.”

Following all of the presentations, the TRANSFORM team attended an awards ceremony where Nadia was awarded the Best Health Sciences / Clinical Trials Unit poster presentation and was awarded a certificate and a £200 voucher.

Reflecting on the award, Nadia said “I felt extremely happy after I won. I think there were many great posters at the symposium, so winning among them really motivated me to go forward with my research. I felt the whole TRANSFORM team helped me get there”

Dr Sagar Jilka was also awarded the Best Gibbet Hill PGR Student Mentor. This award is voted for by the student body and Sagar said that he felt “honoured to have been recognised and voted for by the students”.

The symposium was a great success and all three students came away with valuable feedback that they will be able to use to shape their research. For TRANSFORM, it was great to have all three students in the UK at the same time and the TRANSFORM team congratulates both Nadia and Sagar for their awards.